If this experiment succeeds in producing human cognitive thought in a mouse, we most certainly have an issue.
The issue we'll have is that this threatens the premise of superior human conciousness, calling question to things like souls and God and such. Accomplishments like this threaten concepts that much of our race hold very dear.
Many people that have not gone to school have done good things...but if one sought a job sighting management skills, they are quickly turned down for lack of the so called degrees! This is despite the clear evidence that the so called educated managers have done more havoc than good.
Remarkable people can do remarkable things, often regardless of training or upbrining or what-not. But don't forget about the countless people without management training that have botched things as well. It is naive to imply that management training is going to make people less likely to do well at it.
When considering the exchange of meteorites, it's also important to think about how meteorites actually come to us from Mars.
We're not talking about a rocket safely lifting a rock off of mars and then dropping it on to our planet in a controlled descent...for something to be ejected from Mars, it can only be due to the impact of some other huge meteorite hitting mars. We're talking hundreds of degrees C. The rock then spends literally millions of years in space before happenstance leads it to landing on our planet, meaning millions of years for cosmic radiation to work it's magic.
I'm sure there are things that can survive this, but there are many, many more things that can survive on one of our probes. It would be inaccurate to imply otherwise. Also - it's worth noting that there are only 32 known meteorites from Mars that have impacted our planet. The actual number is surely much larger than this, but not by orders upon orders of magnitude.
This ignores the incredible mass of people now browsing from behind NAT and web proxies that hide often huge numbers of users behind a few IP addresses. Typical examples would be AOL's web proxies and the ever growing NAT setups at large companies these days.
So really, Google is right that they are completely inacurate. I don't think it's safe to make any assumptions with which to normalize these stats.
Don't be so naiive. We all know that movies, software, etc. have extremely low cost of manufacture. There is no 'at a loss'. The only way they can sell something at a loss is if it drops below their cost of manufacture, that's what the term means! They are not selling at a loss, they're selling at the price they can actually make a sale at. It's economics.
If it's clearly fake, then I ask you: how do you prove anything is not fake? I can buy a boxed game for $5. Everything is shrink wrapped, it's from a chain dealer in a mall, the game comes with a manual and all that crap. In fact, the jewel case has a little thingy that says "Not for sale outside of Thailand" (yeah I just checked:) Or, I can buy the same game in a plastic baggie for $0.25 from a little alley stall. Is it not obvious that the former is legitimate? If it's not, then I ask you to give me evidence that the software you purchase from Best Buy is any less legitimate.
Don't be so quick to jump into the standard assumptions about places you obviously have not been. As for your friend... I'd like to know where he went was actually given a receipt with a purchase. Sounds bogus.
Don't be silly. The buying power of $38 in Thailand is much different from $38 in the US.
I'm in Bangkok at the moment actually, for the week. Perhaps some example prices:
1) dinner, with a beer: 80 Baht ($2) 2) 3 star hotel: 1000 Baht ($25) 3) Taxi to the airport: 400 Baht ($10) 4) Commuter train: 10 Baht (25 cents) 5) Recent LEGITIMATE video games: 400+ Baht ($10) 6) Recent LEGITIMATE DVDs: 200+ Baht ($5) 7) etc.
And that's all in Bangkok, not the countryside.
Anyways - if the actually expect people to buy a legitimate copy, they need to at least make an attempt pricing it properly. It's much more convincing to buy the $5 pirate copy of Windows (which you can get in the mall, in the street, you pick) when the legit version is hundreds of dollars! If the price comes down to a sane level, people will consider buying it.
Well, if they configured their web server they wouldn't have to screw around like that:)
The need to tell their webserver to send.WMV files with a content type like 'application/octet-stream' instead of whatever video/* type they default to. This will tell the browser to download it as a file instead of streaming and displaying it. As far as I'm aware MSIE has been respecting content-types with every version after 4.0.
The proposed bill would force programs to inform the user before installing programs, and require that spyware be easily removed.
Hey guess what - people are already informed when these programs are going to be installed. I'm not aware of anything that requires zero user interaction to install, do you? It's either bundled with some other app (seems like this would still fall inside the bounds of this law) or it's through a popup in IE. So instead we'll have spyware programs asking for user confirmation in addition to IE asking for user confirmation - but what difference is that going to make? People already blindly click on the IE security popups.
So oh well. I guess we'll see if this makes a difference, but it seems that the often very subjective distinction between spyware and legit-ware will remove any hope that legislation is going to solve this problem.
In addition, there might not make much sence in talking about frequeny at all on a device like this; if they want to save on power, they only alter the state of the pixels that actually changes between each frame.
This neglects that it takes power to simply maintain the image. As the article states, it's an application of voltage that controls the size of the inkdot pixel. The energy usage is only zero when displaying a completely black image.
I think you're assuming the wrong thing about the purpose of these tags. Certainly, if a child wants to remain untrackable they can simply leave the tag some place.
But I think the purpose here is more for SMALL children, so a parent can have the peace of mind that they child gets of the bus safely, etc. Sure, this doesn't mean the kid isn't going to leave it some place on accident or something, but at a younger age there is little incentive for the child to do that intentionally.
That's all really. I don't think it solves any real problems, but I can definitely see a large number of parents liking the idea of some sort of indication of their child's location. Particularly with all the sensationalism people feed on regarding stolen and missing children, etc.
Apart from giving the NYT your e-mail addy for spam purposes, what real point is there to free registration?
User tracking. While cookies can do this loosely, requiring a login does this much more effectively. I know I login with my same username each time I visit the site (if it's not cached). There's very little reason not to. This gives the NYT a much better indication of how many active and repeat members they have visitting their site. They can then target ads to users much more effectively, and market their userbase to advertisers much more solidly than they could with more rudimentary user tracking methods.
There may be other purposes, but this seems like a large part of it.
Each of the examples you gave are trivial because they follow a very straight forward template.
The bypasser must simply request enough times from the website to see each of the forms that the question can come in. This is finite. Then they setup a group of rules based on each template. For example, "how much is 2 + 2" reduces to just "perform operation N op N".
It's not complicated, and you end up not with uniqueness only based on the # of unique questions you ask. Bypassers don't need to write code that interprets sentences, they simply write code that look at the sentence and fits it to one of the known forms of questions, then does the procedure based on the variables in the current question.
The bottom line - something like what you've outlined is much too simple.
I believe you're referencing Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, in which exactly what you described occurs. Granted - I haven't read God Bless You Mr. Rosewater. I suppose it wouldn't surprise me much for Vonnegut to do something weird like placing the same event in two books, heh:P
Regardless, I find it mildly ironic that you reference Vonnegut for that point, consideringhisfocus for at least the last decade. However, while I don't know Vonnegut's opinions on modern art, that sort of clever confliction would seem to almost typify him.
Perhaps because Measles has a mortality rate of only about 0.2%? CDC Reference. There is also a vaccine for measles (which I'm sure contributes to the mortality rate listed on that page)
With SARS we're also dealing with something we don't entirely understand yet. I'm personally impressed with how serious it's being treated. If anything, it helps us practice in case of a more significant situation.
The ReplayTV and Rio products are what SonicBlue is perhaps more recently known for - but don't forget some of the huge companies of yesteryear that SonicBlue also gobbled up. For starters,
Diamond Multimedia, who was once one of the larger producers of mainstream video cards,
and S3, the unforgettable yet forgettable video chipset.
If my bank charges a transaction fee for checks I write, and I write a check for black-market goods, is my bank "profiting on illegal activities"? How is that logical?
Whether they are legally a bank or not, PayPal's role in the transaction was as a bank, and they are profiting on the transaction, not on the goods. It should not be the responsibility of PayPal to audit all transactions.
Slashdot Mirror
Obvious solution - you need a better access point! There's a great map of them online, just downlo...er heh.
If this experiment succeeds in producing human cognitive thought in a mouse, we most certainly have an issue.
The issue we'll have is that this threatens the premise of superior human conciousness, calling question to things like souls and God and such. Accomplishments like this threaten concepts that much of our race hold very dear.
Many people that have not gone to school have done good things...but if one sought a job sighting management skills, they are quickly turned down for lack of the so called degrees! This is despite the clear evidence that the so called educated managers have done more havoc than good.
Remarkable people can do remarkable things, often regardless of training or upbrining or what-not. But don't forget about the countless people without management training that have botched things as well. It is naive to imply that management training is going to make people less likely to do well at it.
When considering the exchange of meteorites, it's also important to think about how meteorites actually come to us from Mars.
We're not talking about a rocket safely lifting a rock off of mars and then dropping it on to our planet in a controlled descent...for something to be ejected from Mars, it can only be due to the impact of some other huge meteorite hitting mars. We're talking hundreds of degrees C. The rock then spends literally millions of years in space before happenstance leads it to landing on our planet, meaning millions of years for cosmic radiation to work it's magic.
I'm sure there are things that can survive this, but there are many, many more things that can survive on one of our probes. It would be inaccurate to imply otherwise. Also - it's worth noting that there are only 32 known meteorites from Mars that have impacted our planet. The actual number is surely much larger than this, but not by orders upon orders of magnitude.
Don't worry! They've got this covered.
This ignores the incredible mass of people now browsing from behind NAT and web proxies that hide often huge numbers of users behind a few IP addresses. Typical examples would be AOL's web proxies and the ever growing NAT setups at large companies these days.
So really, Google is right that they are completely inacurate. I don't think it's safe to make any assumptions with which to normalize these stats.
Thanks for the tip :) I'm leaving for the airport this afternoon, I'll keep it in mind!
Don't be so naiive. We all know that movies, software, etc. have extremely low cost of manufacture. There is no 'at a loss'. The only way they can sell something at a loss is if it drops below their cost of manufacture, that's what the term means! They are not selling at a loss, they're selling at the price they can actually make a sale at. It's economics.
:) Or, I can buy the same game in a plastic baggie for $0.25 from a little alley stall. Is it not obvious that the former is legitimate? If it's not, then I ask you to give me evidence that the software you purchase from Best Buy is any less legitimate.
... I'd like to know where he went was actually given a receipt with a purchase. Sounds bogus.
If it's clearly fake, then I ask you: how do you prove anything is not fake? I can buy a boxed game for $5. Everything is shrink wrapped, it's from a chain dealer in a mall, the game comes with a manual and all that crap. In fact, the jewel case has a little thingy that says "Not for sale outside of Thailand" (yeah I just checked
Don't be so quick to jump into the standard assumptions about places you obviously have not been. As for your friend
Don't be silly. The buying power of $38 in Thailand is much different from $38 in the US.
I'm in Bangkok at the moment actually, for the week. Perhaps some example prices:
1) dinner, with a beer: 80 Baht ($2)
2) 3 star hotel: 1000 Baht ($25)
3) Taxi to the airport: 400 Baht ($10)
4) Commuter train: 10 Baht (25 cents)
5) Recent LEGITIMATE video games: 400+ Baht ($10)
6) Recent LEGITIMATE DVDs: 200+ Baht ($5)
7) etc.
And that's all in Bangkok, not the countryside.
Anyways - if the actually expect people to buy a legitimate copy, they need to at least make an attempt pricing it properly. It's much more convincing to buy the $5 pirate copy of Windows (which you can get in the mall, in the street, you pick) when the legit version is hundreds of dollars! If the price comes down to a sane level, people will consider buying it.
Well, if they configured their web server they wouldn't have to screw around like that :)
.WMV files with a content type like 'application/octet-stream' instead of whatever video/* type they default to. This will tell the browser to download it as a file instead of streaming and displaying it. As far as I'm aware MSIE has been respecting content-types with every version after 4.0.
The need to tell their webserver to send
The proposed bill would force programs to inform the user before installing programs, and require that spyware be easily removed.
Hey guess what - people are already informed when these programs are going to be installed. I'm not aware of anything that requires zero user interaction to install, do you? It's either bundled with some other app (seems like this would still fall inside the bounds of this law) or it's through a popup in IE. So instead we'll have spyware programs asking for user confirmation in addition to IE asking for user confirmation - but what difference is that going to make? People already blindly click on the IE security popups.
So oh well. I guess we'll see if this makes a difference, but it seems that the often very subjective distinction between spyware and legit-ware will remove any hope that legislation is going to solve this problem.
- whm
In addition, there might not make much sence in talking about frequeny at all on a device like this; if they want to save on power, they only alter the state of the pixels that actually changes between each frame.
This neglects that it takes power to simply maintain the image. As the article states, it's an application of voltage that controls the size of the inkdot pixel. The energy usage is only zero when displaying a completely black image.
I think you're assuming the wrong thing about the purpose of these tags. Certainly, if a child wants to remain untrackable they can simply leave the tag some place.
But I think the purpose here is more for SMALL children, so a parent can have the peace of mind that they child gets of the bus safely, etc. Sure, this doesn't mean the kid isn't going to leave it some place on accident or something, but at a younger age there is little incentive for the child to do that intentionally.
That's all really. I don't think it solves any real problems, but I can definitely see a large number of parents liking the idea of some sort of indication of their child's location. Particularly with all the sensationalism people feed on regarding stolen and missing children, etc.
Apart from giving the NYT your e-mail addy for spam purposes, what real point is there to free registration?
User tracking. While cookies can do this loosely, requiring a login does this much more effectively. I know I login with my same username each time I visit the site (if it's not cached). There's very little reason not to. This gives the NYT a much better indication of how many active and repeat members they have visitting their site. They can then target ads to users much more effectively, and market their userbase to advertisers much more solidly than they could with more rudimentary user tracking methods.
There may be other purposes, but this seems like a large part of it.
Each of the examples you gave are trivial because they follow a very straight forward template.
The bypasser must simply request enough times from the website to see each of the forms that the question can come in. This is finite. Then they setup a group of rules based on each template. For example, "how much is 2 + 2" reduces to just "perform operation N op N".
It's not complicated, and you end up not with uniqueness only based on the # of unique questions you ask. Bypassers don't need to write code that interprets sentences, they simply write code that look at the sentence and fits it to one of the known forms of questions, then does the procedure based on the variables in the current question.
The bottom line - something like what you've outlined is much too simple.
I know this is a tedious point, but there are four oceans, and not everyone knows where Challenger Deep is.
... but how can you write a comment like that, and still not tell us proles where the hell it's at? :)
This may even be more tedious
Rovers in space? I thought we stopped sending dogs into space decades ago!
:)
eh, yikes. ok! ok! I'm sorry
Your friend is a real pig fucker!
:P
Hey hey, don't look at me, I learned it from the cartoons
Heh - This article on the inquirer specifically debunks the referenced Digitimes article:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9704
Enjoy....
~whm
I believe you're referencing Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, in which exactly what you described occurs. Granted - I haven't read God Bless You Mr. Rosewater. I suppose it wouldn't surprise me much for Vonnegut to do something weird like placing the same event in two books, heh :P
Regardless, I find it mildly ironic that you reference Vonnegut for that point, considering his focus for at least the last decade. However, while I don't know Vonnegut's opinions on modern art, that sort of clever confliction would seem to almost typify him.
Perhaps because Measles has a mortality rate of only about 0.2%? CDC Reference. There is also a vaccine for measles (which I'm sure contributes to the mortality rate listed on that page)
With SARS we're also dealing with something we don't entirely understand yet. I'm personally impressed with how serious it's being treated. If anything, it helps us practice in case of a more significant situation.
Better safe than sorry, you know?
The ReplayTV and Rio products are what SonicBlue is perhaps more recently known for - but don't forget some of the huge companies of yesteryear that SonicBlue also gobbled up. For starters,
Diamond Multimedia, who was once one of the larger producers of mainstream video cards,
and S3, the unforgettable yet forgettable video chipset.
If my bank charges a transaction fee for checks I write, and I write a check for black-market goods, is my bank "profiting on illegal activities"? How is that logical?
Whether they are legally a bank or not, PayPal's role in the transaction was as a bank, and they are profiting on the transaction, not on the goods. It should not be the responsibility of PayPal to audit all transactions.
Walk without rhythm, and you won't attract the worm.
Shai-Hulud's a-coming!
The solution is completely stable and nontoxic at room temperature, yet stores more hydrogen per liter than liquid H2.
My Chemistry may be a little shaky, but how can a liquid that's partly made up of H2 store more H2 per liter than liquid H2?